SYSMON – Connecting the industry

Baggrund

Preparing industrial businesses for the next era of digitalization requires a lot of resources and highly trained software professionals. In spite of what most of us may think, the vast majority of manufacturers don’t have their product data available online. The reality is that most small and medium-sized manufacturers lose touch with their product after it is sold.

The new owner has no incentive to prefer the manufacturer over a local repairman for day-to-day service, spare part sales and support. Manufacturers miss out on the potential revenue streams that come from knowing their customers’ needs - even before customers themselves become aware of them. And these revenue streams may just be what makes or breaks industrial manufacturers in the digital era.

Løsning

To change this course of events, Grundfos created SYSMON - an innovative, web based IoT service platform connecting industrial products to a user friendly interface by seamlessly placing their data in the cloud. Manufacturers can now monitor systems, foresee their customers’ needs for spare parts and service, and provide remote control and support, adding significant revenue to their existing business.

SYSMON is an ecosystem with a potentially infinite grid of connected systems. It is used worldwide by engineers and technicians with very different levels of training and skills, and very different data consumption needs. A local technician in a SYSMON ecosystem might respond to just one system, while engineers or country managers in the same group are monitoring hundreds or thousands of systems. We had to create a coherent and satisfying user experience across the infinite number of SYSMON entry points and contexts.

To do so, we created an adaptive dashboard experience, based on a principle of intelligent consolidation of data. Making optimum use of the size of the screen, we created tiles that are dynamic and adapted to the extension of detail required at any given time.

Within the industrial segment, functionality tends to be the overarching priority, often at the expense of user experience and design. With SYSMON, we wanted to adopt a different approach and raise the bar for creating industrial platforms that are both extremely functional and extremely user friendly. To support this principle, we crafted a custom UI-kit that creates a sense of elegance and lightness.

Inspired by an open source mindset, Grundfos has taken a radically different approach to bringing new products and services to market. They want to let customers brand SYSMON in their own name. Therefore, we had to allow customers a certain impact on their own branded platform while ensuring uncompromisable sublime aesthetics. We selected a few significant assets that SYSMON customers can customize in an intuitive set-up that offers immediate, visual feedback. This gives the customer a sense of control and personalization, which ensures emotional ownership without undermining the integrity of the design.